Re: Software bloat

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003, Daniel C. von Asmuth wrote:

> Thus quoth Alex Butcher on Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 11:40:36AM +0000:
> > On Wed, 10 Dec 2003, Daniel C. von Asmuth wrote:
> > 
> > > OK, recently we tried to do some Linux on desktop promotion. We had rigged
> > > up some PCs (1000 MHz, 128 MB) with Fedora 1, KDE 3.1, Mozilla 1.5 or so, 
> > > OpenOffice 1.1, Gimp something. This is about as Windowsish as it gets. 
> > 
> > When you can get Celeron 2.4G/128M machines can easily be had for 331GBP
> > inc., or Celeron 2.5G/256M machines can easily be had for 401GBP inc., why
> > did you pick such a low spec? Windows XP wouldn't ship on much less these
> > days, so why hobble a modern desktop Linux distro with a spec. from 2001 or
> > earlier? Run software that's contemporaneous to the hardware you're running
> > it on.
> 
> Linux used to work on a i386, so how come progress translates to slower soft-
> ware instead of faster?

'cos users want more eye candy with their _general purpose_ OS, and
developers want more functional infrastructure layers (e.g. handing GUIs,
internationalization and so on)

> I used to blame it on an Intel-Microsoft conspiracy. You want a modern
> Linux because it fixes a number of important bugs (mostly for security
> reasons).
> 
> I am currently working on an Intel 80186 with 512kB of RAM and less flash.
> It runs RTOS (which is similar to MS-DOS, with some features removed).

Feel free to code a _special purpose_ desktop OS, akin to GEM or GEOS. I'm
sure that'll still run nicely on low-end "embedded"-type hardware. Of
course, you'll get users asking why they can't open their MS Office
documents and designed-for-IE-webpages on it... :(

> Surely, there are times when you want to run your programs on the fastest
> supercomputer in the World, but you hardly need all that power on your desk.

Who cares when a supercomputer of 10 years ago is available for the about a
week's take-home pay of the average westerner?

What /would/ be nice, would be if components were still in production for
longer. I recently would have loved to spec a 500MHz-1GHz PIII/Celeron
machine for a project introducing computing to low-income families.
Unfortunately, the cheapest Intel CPU was a Celeron 1.7, which really is
overkill for what they were going to use it for. You could probably do
things a /bit/ cheaper if you went with AMD, but you still run into the same
sorts of problems - the cheapest Duron is a 1.3GHz for ~28GBP. I'd rather
use a 700-800MHz Duron for 10-15GBP, if they were still available!

> Kind regards,
> Daniel von Asmuth

Best Regards,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher      Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                      Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x271fd950                         <http://www.assursys.com/>